BIME CEO Rachel Delacour – The Charlene Weisler Interview

Rachel Delacour has taken an international route to her role as CEO of BIME, a data-centric business intelligence company that she built from scratch. She says, “After graduating from business school in Marseille, I began my career in finance at three large French companies with an international footprint: at Bata, Carrefour and FM Logistics Russia. As a 28-year-old controller I decided I wanted unfettered access to fresh data. I realized that Business Intelligence (BI) was just too hard to use, manage, buy and get right. The answer for me was to quit and build the BI service of my dreams.”

Charlene Weisler: Tell me about BIME.

Rachel Delacour: BIME Analytics has defined cloud BI as an indispensable service for anyone with business questions and a browser. BIME was founded in 2009 in Montpellier and is the first pure cloud BI service for the age of Big Data. BIME is one of only a few companies that delivers a simple-to-use yet powerful data analysis, visualization and dashboarding as a plug-and-lay service – [it is] fast, easy to set up and low-cost so companies and teams of any size can "mine their own business." BIME is available in four languages, including Chinese, and has customers across the globe. We were the first vendor to offer front-end BI capabilities for Google BigQuery and have received numerous cloud innovation awards.

CW: How does it feel to be one of the few female CEOs and technologists in Big Data?

RD: The history of the data analytics industry has been dominated by males, both in terms of technology innovation and business leadership, but nowadays there are more and more women taking charge and driving this field to the next level -- that is, not only for a few major companies or a select group of specialists but widespread -- for all business users. I believe this vision is specific to female CEOs. I think that there are still only a few female leaders in the field but I am delighted that I can participate and drive this change even further.

CW: Is BIME able to mash disparate data sets?

RD: BIME can mix data sources on the fly with its Query Blender technology: from the most basic offline data sources such as flat files to complex ones such as SQL databases and up to online data streams such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights or even our unique Youtube Analytics connector and Big Data sources (Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, SAP HANA, etc.). In addition, through the Query Blender, the user can mash, query and display the results of interconnected datasets within one dashboard with multiple views, depending on the type of users: Imagine a company dashboard within which one has mixed all the financial, sales, marketing, PR or social media data sources with customized views for each department.

CW: Is your system able to create new metrics and strategic insights from data?

RD: Definitely. BIME’s power is that it is able to generate answers to complex questions and queries in a matter of seconds while adapting to the logic and patterns of each company, whether startup or corporation from multiple industries. The BIME platform is all about offering the user the customization options for him to create his own KPIs and metrics. More than that, the user can develop customized measures and attributes to dig deeper within data while also customizing his dashboards with filtering options so that his peers can also discover new insights on their own. Users can make their company smarter by benefiting from all the power behind the platform’s simplicity.

CW: Can you give me some predictions as to how the Big Data landscape will evolve over the next 3-5 years?

RD: I believe that two main changes are happening right now in the Big Data field: the way we understand/define Big Data and the way we use Big Data through cloud BI platforms. Data becomes Big Data by default, even for small businesses. Cloud computing and cloud BI, taken together, let organizations of any size seamlessly connect their data sources on the fly and enable enterprises to get answers to their business questions in seconds to discover competitive advantages. The entire web becomes a seamless and scalable data warehouse that grows with an organization’s needs. Sources become Resources.

My consolidated prediction: If one knows how to build a presentation, he will be able to use the entire web as his own data warehouse, create compelling visualizations and share relevant insights anywhere, with anyone, on any device.

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Charlene Weisler

Charlene Weisler is a media research executive with experience that spans broadcast, cable, off-platform, non-linear and broadband. Her expertise is in set top box data, SEO, metrics creation and behavioral psychography. In addition, she writes about the m...